Item — HN Reader

I really, really, need every think piece that talks about 'rebuilding LA' to look at an actual map of what was damaged by the fire before I hear their views on urbanism and what Los Angeles needs.

Yes, 23k acres burned in the Palisades fire, and 15k in the Eaton fire. Yes that's a lot of area compared to SF, Manhattan, etc. Most of that area is mountainside! There's not suddenly 50 square miles of open space in LA to remake in the image of some ideal.

Of the portion of heavily burned land that was developed, quite a bit was also mountainside, or at least foothill. There's ~25 regular-ish blocks of the villages (backed up against foothill) that were destroyed, and some flat-ish area on Sunset Mesa, and the west side of Temescal Canyon, and a bit on Castellammare (but thankfully that wasn't as heavily impacted). But as the names implies, these are all mesa/ridge tops, bracketed by cliffs & canyons. The impacted parts of Altadena are a bit more regular, but very much sloping foothill backed up against their own mountainside. Moreover, both areas are somewhat peripheral, even for the city-without-a-center.

The point being that these are not places one can casually lay out some expansive transit-oriented scheme that's going to solve housing problems for the city. They're topographically and geographically constrained, and need to be rebuilt in a way that's compatible with their constraints. To say nothing of the fact that these were people's homes, and are people's property, and they might have a say on how they would like to rebuild.

There are some real challenges facing LA w.r.t. family-size rental/affordable housing stock, insurance in fire-prone areas, insurance generally depending on state policy, etc. I hope the civic and political energy leveled against barriers to rebuilding in Altadena and the Palisades can later be focused on ongoing transit expansion and associated higher-density development, infill, etc, in the parts of the city where those make sense. But to pretend that these fires present some great opportunity to 'remake' Los Angeles as a whole is a misunderstanding at best, reductive and insulting at worst.

</rant>

4 comments

Thinking only flat areas are ripe for high-density urbanism is still a NIMBY mentality. Where I'm from there were much worse constraints yet the rate of growth by which cities are developed vastly outclasses the YIMBYest cities in the US let alone California.

There should be respect to the families that lost their property. But it's not insulting to suggest that NIMBY development exarcebates disasters like this. Heck if land use was as productive as it should in America most of those families wouldn't have a good chunk of their wealth evaporates as a result of a natural disaster, and rebuilding would've been hella more faster and cheaper.

It seems to me that right solution is to upzone Altadena. Small apartment buildings work fine in dense suburbs.

The other part is that if can’t upzone Palisades to upzone other areas instead. It makes sense to build denser close to transit than force it on rich areas in the hills.

> upzone other areas instead

Yes. This is what we're already doing around the transit we already have. I hope the camaraderie and community drives us to build more, faster.

> upzone Altadena > upzone Palisades

Why? Why is it imperative that we take this disaster as an opportunity to advance policy change in the affected areas specifically? Why should we build denser housing in areas that are clearly at risk for fire?

It was also just destroyed by fire so probably a bad idea to rebuild there.

I was going to include a bit about that, but my comment was already kinda long. All the other reasons besides, the events of the last week should be an indication to the would-be urban planners that the __burn scar__ is perhaps not the best place to locate new high-density density development.

That said I hope policy and prudence drive homeowners that rebuild SFH to include more fire-safety and fire-resistant features. Closed eaves, pool-fed sprinklers, automated shutters, (pains me to say) landscaping setbacks, ...

"You can't build dense buildings on a mountain side"

What are you talking about?!? Downtown San Francisco has easily 4x the density of the area and it's built on mountains. Italy has dense villages on the sides of mountains all over the place. The idea that nobody can build density in 2025 because of some type of geological feature is just ridiculous, self-serving, nothing should change ever talk.

None of SF's dense apartment buildings are on hills, there is a good reason for that. You could terrace them like they do in Chongqing, but even in HK they tend to build in valleys between mountains except for luxury condo housing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Levels). Italy follows the same pattern as SF.

That's just not true. Russian Hill has plenty of highrises that were built in the 1970s: https://maps.app.goo.gl/LukSfpMG5DnumTL79

The point isn't that LA should force the area to be highrises. The point is that it should be legal, in a housing crisis, to increase the density of one of the lowest density neighborhoods in LA, which is already an incredibly low density city.

Literally just building row houses instead of SFH's would easily double the density. Three-unit row houses like in much of hilly SF would increase the density by 6x. The idea that we either need skyscrapers or SFH's is exactly the problem with our zoning laws. People should be able to build multi-unit when the demand is there.

The point was that the headline numbers don't really represent the amount of existing development that was destroyed. There's been lots of comparisons of the area to e.g. Manhattan which I think drives some of these think-pieces that act like there's a city-sized blank-canvas area to rebuild.

Could we have built on more of the burned-over mountainside? Maybe? I'm not sure SF is the right comparison though. Just the developed portion affected by the Palisades fire ranges from sea level to 450m elevation (over ~2.5mi straight-line distance); Temescal Peak is 650m. Most of developed peninsular SF is below 100m elevation. Its more like trying to densifiy Berkely or Pacifica or Carmel by building apartment buildings up their hills.

Doable? Probably. But why go to the trouble? Why take the fire and seismic risk of building dense housing on a mountainside when LA is spoiled for space in the basin and valley?

Twin Peaks is 282m in elevation. There many, many multi unit developments exactly at the top: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rm73b1j67W3u8uYo9

I'm just so sick and tired of ignorant people pretending that elevation, grade, or seismic matter at all when Japan exists, and builds high density housing, regularly in conditions that are vastly more inhospitable than coastal California. Pretending that suburban SFH are safer and more economical is just backward.

>Why go to the trouble?

Because density more efficient, can pay for it's own infrastructure in the long run: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

It is also less prone to fire risk.

Building suburban SFHs requires everyone else to subsidize it's development, which is already happening exactly with the California FAIR Plan, which will now require literally everyone in the United States to pay more on their homeowners insurances policies to compensate for the predictable losses here, if the system isn't just federally bailed out directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_FAIR_Plan

> I'm just so sick and tired of ignorant people pretending that elevation, grade, or seismic matter at all

If they don't matter at all, there's tons of steep lots you can buy in the hills for like 10-50k with neighboring houses in the mid-to-high millions. People say they're unbuildable but apparently there's no such thing?

More seriously, I generally agree with most what you're saying. It should be easier to increase density in Los Angeles. By-right ADUs & JADUs, 4-unit TIC conversions, transit-oriented dvelopment are all a good start. We should do more. I shouldn't see anything but the back of apartment buildings from my window on the Expo line. 500k people should live in DTLA. Wilshire should look like Tokyo as soon as the train is done.

It's just weird to bring this energy to such a tragic situation. I don't think you could honestly say Altadena and the Palisades were the top two areas you'd focus on increasing density prior to Jan 7. They're no closer, nor easier to connect to transit, nor less fire-prone today than they were then. Most of the SFH that was destroyed in the Palisades were $3-9m[1] houses on 1/8th acre lots i.e. doing a pretty good job paying their own way on their infrastructure. The insurance stuff is going to be a pain, but I expect the prospective-risk model that was just authorized will force homeowners to bear more of their risk (and thereby apply some market forces to land-use decisions in the rebuild). And if the highest-GDP county in the highest-GDP state in the county needs, for once, a bit of Federal help it'd be hard to characterize that as unfair.

To focus on them as a place to enact specific parts of your urban-design vision (however good it is!) feels just as exploitive as 'investors' trying to buy lots cheaply to remake in the image _they_ prefer. These are our friends and neighbors, victims of a disaster. We should help them rebuild as quickly and prudently as possible, so we all can continue pulling the city toward a denser, safer, healthier future.

[1]: yes yes some prop 13 bases in there that I'm approximating away sue me.

>If they don't matter at all, there's tons of steep lots you can buy in the hills for like 10-50k with neighboring houses in the mid-to-high millions. People say they're unbuildable but apparently there's no such thing?

Except that it was literally illegal to build anything except SFH's, until the state removed R1 zoning, and even now, you can generally only get two units. They are "unbuildable" because the projects won't pencil, not because we don't have the engineering capabilities.

>It's just weird to bring this energy to such a tragic situation.

I will be completely honest, that the move to exempt wildfire victims from the regulations that anyone without an established home has to deal with is one of the most self-serving, "rules for thee but not for me," results I've seen in my lifetime.

The housing system in CA is broken, and instead of taking this as an opportunity to fix it, we just exempt the very people who benefit from the broken situation most. It's perfectly legal, but it's deeply inequitable.

Is that insensitive of me? I want these people to be able to rebuild as soon as possible, but pretending it's not wildly inequitable to not change the rules for everyone, is just myopia.

To double down on my admittedly unpopular concerns, by allowing people to rebuild without exemption but not fixing the underlying issues, we've opened the door for one of the biggest cases of moral hazard I've ever seen. Call me cynical, but if some disgruntled and unscrupulous homeowner is in a fight with the Coastal Commission, they now know that a wildfire will likely let them do what they want. It's not something 99.9% of folks would do, but the incentives are right there. Moral hazard should be taken seriously.

>Most of the SFH that was destroyed in the Palisades were $3-9m[1] houses on 1/8th acre lots i.e. doing a pretty good job paying their own way on their infrastructure.

As you know the vast majority of them are not paying property taxes at that rate, and never will.

> moral hazard

Even SBF wouldn’t take that risk. Billions of dollars of personal liability against … the coastal commission lets you build 110% of the house you already had? Gotta do it a few times to get enough additional square footage to make it worthwhile…

The expedited permissions aren’t carte blanche, they’re pretty limited to rebuilding in place. Which I think you know since you’re agitating for looser regulations to allow the kind of development you’d prefer instead. Does the moral hazard work the other way? Should we worry about Strongtowns readers torching neighborhoods they want to rebuild?

> vast majority

Assessments are public record. Go poke around on the assessors map. There’s a fair share of low bases like my footnote said, but plenty of houses traded over the last 5-10 years, and plenty of people are paying 20-50k a year.

> take this opportunity

Again why does this disaster demand we also solve the housing crisis at the same time? We lost <1% of housing stock, it’s not like we’re rebuilding a leveled city. Work toward policies that that will incentivize the development you’d prefer in places it makes sense across the city, don’t be gross and seize on a crisis to try to impose the change you want.

> We lost <1% of housing stock, it’s not like we’re rebuilding a leveled city.

In a shortage, marginal consumers wipe out the consumer surplus. The new marginal consumer is now a multi-millionaire. Housing prices will spike dramatically in LA, in every neighborhood, for a decade.

That frictional pain is going to make the median person mad, and harm many peoples’ lives. We should talk again in a year when that new reality has settled in.